This invention relates to the testing of seeds, and in particular to the automating of testing of seeds.
In developing high performance seeds, it is often desirable to ensure that each seed in a given population exhibits a particular characteristic. For example in the development of corn seeds, it might be desirable to ensure that each seed in the population has a given oil content, e.g. an oil content of at least 5-6 percent. One method of non-destructively determining characteristics of a seed such as the oil content of a seed is through analysis of the seed, and in particular nmr testing of the seed. It would be very time consuming and tedious, and thus very expensive, to individually test each seed in a large population manually, and thus most seed development programs rely upon testing of representative samples of the population, however, because of the variations among seeds even from the same plants, representative sampling is not as effective as testing all seeds.